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To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the
by namdnay 8y ago
To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the expectation of selling you to someone, in this case facebook
- zimablue 8y agoYeah, how could a service like sending text messages from one device to another be free in the long term!? Think of the infrastructure and technology costs. No, wait, most people on this forum could knock up a messaging app in a couple of days and run it on aws lambda for less than pennies per user per year. https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ I'm being snarky but I really don't get your point, nothing about this is expensive or difficult. Signal case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877
- robjan 8y agoSignal has a few orders of magnitude fewer users and uses tens of millions of dollars per year.
- skinnymuch 8y agoDo you think Signal doesn’t cost a good amount of money per year?
- thinkloop 8y ago> pennies per user per year Times 1.5 billion users is at least $30m / year, where to get that?
- calv 8y agoI'm pretty sure when I joined Whatsapp you could pay to have access for a couple of years, so it had a sustainable model, especially if they just turned the dial slowly on pricing.
- justapassenger 8y agoAll we know is that it had a model. How do you know it was sustainable?
- def_true_false 8y agoWhatsApp charged users $1 per year until January 2016, when they had somewhere between 900M and 1000M users. Not sure how many of them were paying, since it wasn't really being enforced.
- trulyrandom 8y agoIn all those years, I've never been prompted to pay.